java.lang.ClassNotFoundException: javax.servlet.ServletContainerInitializer

Question

I was working on writing some servlets and they all worked fine Tomcat had no issue running what so ever. Then I wrote a class file that used JERSEY and when I tried to run

Answer 1

javax/servlet/ServletContainerInitializer is a class in Servlet 3.0 which is not support in Tomcat 6.

You probably have servlet.jar floating around somewhere in your CLASSPATH, it shouldn't be. This really messes up the classloaders since Tomcat's classloaders don't act quite as normal as one expects (see links above). servlet.jar should only be found only once in $CATALINA_HOME/lib.